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Tag Archives: Flex

Adobe recently submitted a US Patent application that relates to SEO for Flash / Flex, titled "EXPOSING RICH INTERNET APPLICATION CONTENT TO SEARCH ENGINES." Believe it or not, this Patent application claims "shadowing" techniques like SWFObject and SOFA are at an "obvious disadvantage" for search. According to Adobe, shadowing textual content in rich Internet applications with textual content in (X)HTML results in duplication and other issues. For those not aware, duplicate content thins keyword relevancy, Google's secret sauce, PageRank and requires a "duplication of effort" in producing "the actual rich Internet application as well as the shadow HTML." This Patent claims site management time is also increased because "changes in the rich Internet application must also be made to the shadow HTML, if that HTML code is to remain consistent with the rich Internet application."

To address these and other issues, Adobe's application proposes an invention that returns different content to users and search engines. According to the Patent application, content will be "available through a rich Internet application to search engine queries" via a "translation module" that interfaces "between a Web crawler and a rich Internet application." It seems this application isn't intended to provide alternative textual "eye wash" for users, but instead descriptions of the state, content and identifying URLs that are "important to Web crawler and/or search engines." According to Adobe the "translation module may comprise pseudo HTML page code providing a description of the state which omits description of aspects of the state which are not useful to Web crawler and/or search engine. According to the invention application, "cached pages" will reflect a poorly formatted and quite likely partially humanly readable page.